Preview

Demetrius And Helena In The Play A Midsummer Night's Dream

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
663 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Demetrius And Helena In The Play A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream Essay
According to Meriam Webster Dictionary (2017), love is defined as "strong affection for another based on kinship ties, an attraction based on sexual desire or affection based on admiration or benevolence ". A Midsummer Night's Dream shows us a modern twist on how love can be everything a person could ever dream of, or it can also be someone's worst nightmare.
While many people may fall in love at first sight, some build a relationship and then fall in love, and there are some that may like someone but are not in love with them at the time, but ends up falling in love with them in the end. This is the relationship of Demetrius and Helena in the play "A Midsummer Night's Dream". Helena was in love with Demetrius,
…show more content…
In the play, the parental love appeared to be Oberon love towards the Indian boy as well as Titania love of protection on him. While Shakespeare does not touch on why Oberon is obsessed with the Indian boy, however, it does talk about why Titania is not willing to give him to Oberon. Bevington (2014) writes, "Set your heart at rest, the fairy land buys not the child of me, His mother was a vot'ress of my order" (p.52). The Indian boy mother dies, so it seems that Titania has been his mother ever since. Because Titania refuses to give the Indian boy up, Oberon cast a love spell on her, which makes her fall in love with Bottom that is half Ass and half man. This to me his parental love because Oberon was very much in love with the Indian boy, and regardless of his love for his wife, he cast a spell on her because of it (Bevington, 2014). Another type of love that is displayed in the play was the love that Lysander and Hermia had for each other. Their love seemed to be sincere and may have started out as an innocent friendship, but later they started to have feelings for one another. When Hermia and Lysander learned that Egeus had given his blessing to Demetrius to marry Hermia, Lysander ask Hermia to run off with him into the wood, to flee from the law of the father and get married (Bevington,

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    So in class we just read the play Midsummer night's dream. I thought that the play was very interesting because this play was taken place a long time ago. But in this essay I got the question. What is Shakespeare saying about love?…

    • 410 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Describe the field work and research you undertook to investigate the pressure of human activities on the coast (15)…

    • 430 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare is telling the readers that, love needs no reason to exist; it defies logic and ignores all circumstances. This compelling message is very thoroughly communicated with the connection of the fantasy world and reality. The connection occurs in a forest, where each character of significance is, at one point, present. Here, the characters experience unforeseen events, as a result of the debatable use of magic, from those in power. However, despite the extreme unusualness and complications, the characters challenge the circumstances, and persist in loving the one they feel closest to. In this play, this situation is best represented by three significant relationships. The first exists between a lover and her hater, the next involves a young and rebellious couple, and the last concerns an ill-fated mechanical and the queen of the fairies.…

    • 491 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Love is a mysterious journey. Love can either be for the better, or the worse. Love should be the choice of you, yourself, and not forced upon you by others. As the famous quote “Love is not for the faint of heart.” states, love is not an easy thing. You must undergo heartache, failure and rejection in order to succeed with love. This is very prevalent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the case of Lysander and Demetrius.…

    • 584 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    People of the twenty first century do not understand the real meaning of love. Men and women want love for the same reason today as they did in the sixteenth century. In William Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” he proves how people use love for the wrong reasons such as forced love, parental love, and romantic love.…

    • 668 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “That’s the way of the world… for every man that is faithful to his true love, a million end up running after a different lover.” (pg. 91) Shakespeare uses the comedy of Midsummer’s Night Dream to show the many complexities of love. For example, Egeus wants his daughter Hermia to marry Demetrius, but she is in love with Lysander and him with her. Meanwhile Helena is in love with Demetrius, who obviously does not feel the same about her. Even the play that the rude mechanicals put on for Theseus is based around the humor and complexities of love.…

    • 341 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Shakespeare's "a Midsummer Nights Dream" love is shown in many different ways. During the play there are many different sub-stories and extra plots that it is easy for Shakespeare to add many different ideas, these sub-stories in the play are the story of Pyrimus & Thisbee and also the story of the Fairy King and Queen Oberon and Titania. With these added plots in place Shakespeare adds the themes of deceit, magic and confusion.…

    • 1137 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    We all know for a fact that Shakespeare is surely one romanticized writer. After all, most of his successful playwrights revolved around the theme of love (Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer's Night Dream). I would not be surprised myself if he had more than one wife during his lifetime. In “A Midsummer's Night Dream”, there are many romantic and loving couples (or perhaps just an infatuated couple through the work of hormones) mentioned in the play. These couples consists of: Theseus and Hippolyta, Helena and Demetrius, Hermia and Lysander, Titania and Bottom, and finally; the conflicting Oberon and Titania. Although we may assume that the list of couples mentioned were in love, there are three types of love which are sub-categorized into: “Eros”, infatuation and arranged love.…

    • 586 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Love, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is “a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person, which is mutual.” In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare, there are three couples who are in love, but all under very different circumstances. At the beginning of the play, Egeus forbids his daughter Hermia to marry Lysander, her true love, in favor Demetrius. Puck, a hobgoblin and mischief-maker, puts a spell on Lysander and Demetrius to make them fall in love with Helena. Throughout, the story we see three couples who wed because of external force, not mutual affection which negatively affects the story; one for the sake of peace as is the case of Hippolyta and Theseus, the second between Demetrius and Helena due to a love potion and finally, and a third couple who lives up to the definition of love, Hermia and Lysander.…

    • 829 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Shakespeare uses the theme of love to show how complicated love can be; Hermia falling in love with Lysander and Egeus not allowing her to get married to Lysander. Lysander and Hermia try to figure things out between themselves and their forbidden love, “The course of true love never did run smooth”. On the other hand Shakespeare uses comical love with Helena’s unrequited love for Demetrius. Helena is so sad she calls herself his spaniel, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” Another example of comical love is Titania falling in love with Bottom, with the ass’s head on. Love can blind our eyes in some situations and we can fall head over heels, which makes us look quite foolish. The ‘play within a play’ characters, Pyramus and Thisbe, have comical but also tragic love as Shakespeare makes the young man who plays Thisbe to be really embarrassed to have to play the part of a girl. Their love is also very tragic as Pyramus thinks Thisbe is dead and kills himself and later on Thisbe sees him dead and kills herself. (A parallel story to Romeo and Juliet).…

    • 1781 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Fetch Me That Flower

    • 859 Words
    • 2 Pages

    “Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew’d thee once: The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid will make or man or woman madly dote upon the next live creature that it sees” Says Oberon to Puck as he describes the effect the love potion has on mortals. This sounds strikingly similar to the sensation of “Love at first sight”. Although most of the conflict in the Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream arises from true love rather than the magical idea of Love that Oberon describes here, this statement shows us just one of the kinds of love that Shakespeare brings to the Play. The multifaceted nature of love is shown consistently throughout the play as the audience witness the paternal love of Egius and Helena, The forbidden love of Hermia and Lysander, Unrequited love which Helena and Demetrius are victims of, the vengeful love of Oberon and Titania, The exaggerated romantic love that the lovers experience as a result of the potion and lastly the abstract companionship of the Mechanicals which some critics may interpret as being love of some kind.…

    • 859 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    As Lysander says, "The course of true love never did run smooth." Love in A Midsummer Night's Dream is portrayed as complicated and difficult, yet Shakespeare does it in a way that is humorous and lighthearted. In this play love often brings out the worst in people, yet in the end it's what brings everyone back together. Love has the ability to spellbind people as Shakespeare represents symbolically through Puck's actions, and we see how intensely complicated it can be when it nearly tears apart Hermia's family and causes argument between the four main human characters. The four types of love, forced love, parental love, romantic love and complicated love permeate all aspects of life in this play and we see the awesome power it has over human emotion, psychology, and behavior.…

    • 863 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    LYSANDER, in love with Hermia: Lysander’s relationship with Hermia shows the theme of the difficulty of love. For example, he cannot marry her openly because Egeus, her father, wishes her to wed Demetrius, and when Lysander and Hermia run away into the forest, Lysander becomes the victim of misapplied magic and wakes up in love with Helena.…

    • 1667 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Living in the Tidewater region the majority of my life, I have seen it flood the majority of the times when it rains terribly. The areas that are usually affected when it seems to rain terribly is in Norfolk and Chesapeake. About a year ago there was a bad thunderstorm that left the entire underpass flooded to where if the cars decided to continue driving to the other side then he or she will risk totaling their car. But in general, because Norfolk is surrounded by a lot of water it seems to always flood very easily.…

    • 215 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sometimes we feel that isolation is the best way protect ourselves, our fears, secrets, and insecurities. In “ Mending Wall” Robert Frost describes the narrator and the neighbor having different positions on whether or not the wall between them, both literally and figuratively should be taken down. Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall”, is about the relationship between the narrator and their neighbor. While the narrator states, “Something there that doesn’t love a wall”, suggesting that the neighbor believes the wall is no longer needed, the neighbor replies with,“Good fences make good neighbors”, disagreeing on the idea of removing the wall. The positions of these characters are neither right nor wrong based on their own reasoning on what is best to do with the wall.…

    • 517 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics